The Unexpected History of 'Black Friday'

Since the 1950s, Black Friday—once simply known as "the day after Thanksgiving"—has grown into a quasi-holiday in the United States marked by steep discounts, ceaseless shopping, and occasional violence. But more recently, Black Friday has also metastasized. It's not a day anymore. It's a week, a month, a veritable state of mind. (Speaking of which, check out Lifehacker's Black Friday coverage. We got all the deals, baby!) While pre-dawn trips to the mall are waning as online shopping grows, in-person shopping on Black Friday is still a big deal in the U.S.—it’s estimated that around 80 million Americans visited a brick-and-mortar store on Black Friday in 2025. But how did Black Friday come about, and what does it all mean?When was the first Black Friday?“Black Friday” in the United States originally referred to the start of the Panic of 1869, when the collapse of the price of gold devastated the national economy. “Black Friday” as a description of the day after Thanksgiving dates back to 1951; the term first appeared in the journal Factory Management and Maintenance, where it referred to the number of employees who skipped work on the day after Thanksgiving. Around the same time, the police in Philadelphia and Rochester started informally using “Black Friday” to describe the traffic and crowds that appeared in their cities as shoppers hit the stores on the day after Thanksgiving. The phrase gradually caught on. It was picked up by national press in 1975 when the New York Times used "Black Friday" specifically to describe the day after Thanksgiving and the shopping and sales it brings. But even before it had a name, Black Friday was a thing. The day after Thanksgiving has been known by merchants as the start of the shopping season since the late 1800s. By the early 20th century, retailers sponsored Thanksgiving Day parades that traditionally ended with an appearance by Santa Claus, as if to say, “Now it’s time to shop for Christmas.” By unspoken agreement among retailers, Christmas-themed advertisements rarely appeared before Thanksgiving in our grandparents’ day. This informal bargain obviously no longer applies. Black Friday’s problematic nameReferring to a day as “black” traditionally denotes a period of calamity or tragedy, leading some to suggest different names for the day. In the early 1960s, Philadelphia merchants suggested “Big Friday,” a name which did not catch on, leaving retailers with the weak explanation that the “black” in Black Friday refers to the black ink denoting profits in a ledger. Oft-repeated lore suggests that retailers are "in the red" all year, and only start making an annual profit at the end of the year, but big retail chains generally make money all year long. A more modern issue with the name is that Black Friday sales now last for days or even weeks, beginning in early to mid-November and bleeding over into the following Saturday, Sunday, “Cyber Monday,” Tuesday, and beyond, leading people to say things like, “Do you want to go Black Friday shopping this Sunday?” So far, alternative names like “Five-Day Frenzy” and “The day I get to trample someone to save $8 on a Nespresso” haven’t caught on. But here’s hoping. The failure of “Black Thursday” Beginning around 2010, an insatiable thirst for profits led many retailers to push the start of Black Friday shopping to Thursday (aka Thanksgiving Day). Kmart opened Thanksgiving morning. Toys R Us opened that night. By 2011, Walmart was opening its doors at 10 p.m. on Thursday. The trend led to widespread backlash, with many Americans appalled that employees were forced to work on Thanksgiving or angry that consumerism was encroaching upon a holiday meant to celebrate colonialism. By 2021, most major retailers had relented and elected to remain closed on Thanksgiving. Cyber Monday is Black Friday’s accidental offspringThe term “Cyber Monday” describes the boost in online retail sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving, sparked by workers returning to the office and getting right to online shopping. The term first appeared on Nov. 28, 2005, in a Shop.org press release entitled “'Cyber Monday’ Quickly Becoming One of the Biggest Online Shopping Days of the Year," which may be the most influential press release ever written. Since its early 2000s birth, Cyber Monday has become the biggest online shopping day of the year. Americans spent $14.25 billion online on Cyber Monday 2025, according to Adobe Analytics. So is Cyber Monday bigger than Black Friday? Retailers really don't care: Analysts now tend to mash everything into the category of "Black Friday–Cyber Monday" (or even "Cyber Week"). "Buy Nothing Day" is the inverse of Black FridayIf all this naked consumerism makes you a little squeamish, you're not alone. Anti-consumerists have named the day after Thanksgiving “Buy Nothing Day,” which you can celebrate by doing charity work, cutting up your credit cards, or simply not purchasing anything. Pioneered by artist Ted Dave and popularized by Adbusters magazine, the first Buy Nothing Day was celebrated in Canada in 1992. What do you think so far? It’s hard to measure the success of the alternative holiday. Both online and brick-and-mortar retail sales have increased sharply since 1992, suggesting Buy Nothing Day’s effect is negligible. On the other hand, maybe big retailers are losing millions because someone on Bluesky reminded you not to shop. Sure.How many deaths has Black Friday caused?Depending on how you measure it, Black Friday has resulted in between one and 17 deaths. Jdimytai Damour is the only person killed directly due to a Black Friday sale: The 34-year-old worker was trampled to death by a surging crowd at a Long Island Walmart on Black Friday in 2008. If you include car accidents, shootings, retail worker suicides, and fatal heart attacks, Black Friday’s death toll balloons to 17, with 128 reported injuries. Black Friday violence has even inspired a horror flick: Eli Roth's 2023 holiday-themed slasher Thanksgiving opens with a hilariously brutal Black Friday riot at a big box store, setting off a chain of events that involve a lot of people being murdered by a dude in a Pilgrim mask. Is Black Friday just hype?I mean, yeah, of course. Critics of Black Friday point out that there are arguably better times to buy a new TV (like the week before the Super Bowl), not to mention plenty of other goods. Savings from Black Friday shopping are often illusory—big-ticket “doorbuster” items generally sell out quickly, leaving behind goods that are, by and large, priced the same as they would be at any other time of year. Some retailers even mark up products ahead of Black Friday so the discounts look bigger. If you're buying online, your browser history, location, and cart contents can tweak the prices you see on Black Friday, as they can on any other day. Yet despite protest holidays, the unpleasantness of shopping when stores are overcrowded, and the frustration of hunting for bargains that often aren't that great to begin with, Black Friday stubbornly remains an unofficial holiday, celebrated by over 100 million Americans in one way or another. What that says about our country's relationship with capitalism is unclear, but personally, I’m going to continue my own day-after-Thanksgiving tradition of eating pie for breakfast and thinking about going for a walk, but then watching The Quick and the Dead instead. I'm not protesting anything; I just don't need the hassle.